Theatre review: Richard III
Directed by John Haidar, produced by Headlong Theatre with Alexandra Palace, Bristol Old Vic, with Royal and Derngate, Northampton and Oxford Playhouse
“What do I fear? Myself?”
By the time Tom Mothersdale’s Richard III delivers these famous lines, he is shattered and paralysed with fear: not so much of the battle that lies ahead of him (because, for those not overly familiar with the play, the scene takes place briefly ahead of the Battle of Bosworth Field), but of the ghosts of his recent past; those of the people he has killed himself or was responsible for their death (King Henry VI, his brother, the Duke of Clarence, his wife, Queen Anne, his nephews, Lord Hastings and an earlier trusted ally who helped orchestrate his rise to power, the Duke of Buckingham… it is a long list) who come and haunt him from the depths of his awakening conscience; messengers cursing him in his dreams, wishing him a gruesome death, punishing him in his mind and heart for all the wrongs he has done and the crimes he has committed.
It is a strikingly painful and difficult scene to watch. Leaning with his back against a glass door, and looking at himself reflected left and right in the mirrors surrounding him, Mothersdale turns Richard’s monologue into a dialogue of sorts, engaging in an intense conversation with himself to get across the painful truth that no soul will pity or mourn Richard if he was to perish on the battlefield tomorrow. Just moments after, he engages in a battle: alone, on a minimalistic, metaphorical battlefield — with the ghosts returning, taunting him from behind the glass — Richard fights himself as much as his enemies with nothing but mud and silenced screams, shaking and twitching on the edge of losing his mind. In a short and tangibly real physical confrontation with the Earl of Richmond (played by Caleb Roberts) that follows, he loses the battle, the crown he has so passionately coveted, England and his life.
In John Haidar’s beautifully directed and staged production, nothing is simple and, most of the time, easy to watch. Every scene seems to tell more than one story, opening the door wider to understanding both Richard’s internal and external world: that what he keeps tucked away, hidden within, how he acts towards others and the kind of world he resides in.
This is not to imply that the play is a fully serious affair. Mothersdale delivers the part with an unexpected dose of humour and manages to draw the audience into his world by allowing them to become his confidants, breaking the “fourth wall” as he does this. When Richard passionately convinces Lady Anne to stab him, in an act aimed to prove his (deceitful) love and devotion, he puts on an injured, martyr’s face for her, but signals to the audience he is unharmed with a cheerful boyish grimace as soon as she turns her back on him. Having won her over he raises his hands in the air as if to say: “Look what I’ve done!”, with a wry smile, before continuing on to deliver his (cruel) monologue that reduces her simply to one of the replaceable, disposable means to his end. (Although the apparent honesty of the previous scene did leave me wondering every night if perhaps he was not being somewhat untruthful only when delivering his charms, but also some of his cruelties; I guess intricate performances play with one’s mind in this way.) His humour is disarming, his charm undeniable. Despite knowing that laughing at his sneaky acts makes them complicit in a way, the audiences were clearly unable to resist doing so on all the four nights I ended up seeing the play on stage in Manchester, allying openly with the one character they knew they were not supposed to.
Indeed, embodying Richard on stage Mothersdale seems to almost test the audience to see just how far he can go. For his Richard is a ruthless one, too. He dispatches orders for murder at a pace that feels more like a film than a theatre play, and he does so without stopping to think twice, or even blink. Whoever stands between Richard and the crown, must vanish. If not deciding on who to kill, he occasionally torments: when he forces Elizabeth to persuade her eldest daughter to marry him, to go from being his niece to being his wife and queen, he coerces her into a kiss, and then turns around spitting vigorously in disgust — for no other reason but to show his contempt. By the time he proclaims that he can add “colours to the chameleon” (a speech taken from the “Henry VI” play) to get what he wants, there’s no doubting him. He will go to any length to get what he is after.
By this point it is probably needless to openly say that Mothersdale’s acting is absolutely phenomenal; it is him who binds all the elements of the play together. Up on stage — twisted, contorted, in a leg brace, his shoulder sticking out, reduced to a short, childlike proportion compared to those around him and looking gently fragile — his Richard is less a man than he is a creature. And he knows it oh-so well… The beautiful stage design (done by Chiara Stephenson) resembling a crown of mirrors encircling the area around him (which also serve as revolving doors for characters to exit and enter, as well as “windows” through which the ghosts come back to haunt Richard) reflects his deformities equally clear as the cold faces and words of members of his royal family, who openly shun and despise him. He cannot escape himself, and of that he is constantly reminded, his longing for affection lingering in the air of the gloomy, dimly lit stage. And when he breaks — most notably under the heavy weight of his mother’s words cursing him to die while admitting her endless shame over who he is — you can almost hear the sound of his soul’s armour cracking, his heart being crushed. Under the heaviness of his self-loathing and others’ contempt, he loses himself for a brief second, clearly a man of flesh and blood under the velvet garments and the golden crown.
As the play proceeds and he starts caving in under the pressure, fear and loneliness, Richard becomes more and more visibly unnerved: scratching and twisting his arm more vigorously, biting his nails… Manifesting signs of his slow disintegration in the subtlest of details. It is truly a remarkable performance by Mothersdale, one that stays like a lingering presence in the mind of the spectator long after the lights in the theatre have been turned back on.
While the other cast members don’t get too many chances to fully shine, overshadowed slightly by Mothersdale who spends most of the play center stage, it would be unjust not to mention their contributions. Stefan Adgebola is particularly excellent as sly Buckingham, Heledd Gwynn as Hastings/Ratcliffe. The light and the sound are minimal, used sparingly to highlight the most dramatic moments. The threatening ticking of the clock enhances the overarching feeling of suspense and distress; the music highlighting Richard’s battlefield horror adds to an intense feeling of despair. Nothing is over the top, but the little details make a difference.
In his brave re-telling of Shakespeare’s familiar story, Haidar clearly refuses to judge his main character or reduce him to an infamous “villain” he is often perceived to be, choosing instead to use the stage to explore who he really is; to bare all of his sides in front of the audience and let them decide if they choose to condemn him, pity him, hate him or accept him for the imperfect human being that he is, a product of his harsh upbringing, circumstances, self-loathing that derives from his “deformed, unfinished” physicality, and of his longing for love, which he simultaneously seems to crave and fails to grasp. In this beautiful, haunting production, he creates a play that is as much a tale of the Duke of Gloucester’s bloody path to the throne as it is a brave, both cruel and gentle, inquisitive story of human nature.
Perhaps Richard’s saddest moment comes in the play’s final scene: defeated on the battlefield, abandoned in the mud, when he reaches out his hand in death to be led by the ghost of King Henry VI to reside with the ghosts of his victims, he is denied. Even in death, he is alone.
I wish all theatre was this daring, bold, emotional and enchanting.
Seen at the HOME Manchester, April 30-May 3, at The Old Vic, Bristol, March 4 (preview)
